Monday, October 29, 2007

Election Day / Día de Elecciones

Sunday, October 28, Election Day in Colombia.

This time, it was regional and local elections: departmental governors and assemblies and municipal mayors and councils. Quibdó is pretty dead; lots of people have left to vote in their home towns, lots of businesses don’t open, though many do. There are streets roped off by the police around the polling places. The police presence has been impressive the last few days. Yesterday lots of cars and pedestrians where stopped at police checkpoints. Every election, it’s expected that the guerrilla organizations will try to disrupt the process; indeed a number of candidates were murdered in the weeks running up to today. But things seem to be going smoothly. The truth is, Uribe seems to have brought an increased security in the towns and the major roads; the question is, at what price? But the voting seems to be going relatively smoothly, only minor problems here as I write this. And it’s worth pointing out that unlike in the US, voting is on a Sunday, not a workday, as if the system wanted people to be able to vote.

However, it’s also worth pointing out that—perhaps not unlike the US—the ballot is way too complex. The voter gets four ballots to mark, one for each of the offices being elected. Each ballot is divided into two sections. Above are the symbols of the parties, and you mark one of these, so the party gets credit for your vote. Then below, you mark the number of the candidate you actually want to vote for (if you remember what number it was). I was talking to a friend who has worked with the diocese and with COCMACIA, the federation of Afro-Colombian communities in this area. He expressed concern that lots of people wouldn’t do this correctly:

“If you mark just the party and not the candidate, the party gets a vote, but not the candidate.”“Then what happens? Does the party end up choosing its representative?”“Really, I don’t know how it works.”“But if you don’t know, how will less experienced people understand?”“That’s the problem.”

The real story is not in the voting so much as in a widespread and profound sense of cynicism and hopelessness when it comes to politics. The whole story in summed up in an exchange I had with a guy I know, a poor worker, on the street outside a school where people were voting:

“Jimmy, these groups of people standing around, is it true that they’re waiting for someone to come and buy their votes?”“Sure, it’s always like this, and there will be lots more people later.”“There’s an awful lot of cynicism here.”“Yes, Steve, but the politicians did that.”

The problem is that both international and Colombian election observers are going to report that the voting went smoothly. But are they going to be able to report how many of the voters had sold their votes (and cheap!), how many people are so disillusioned that they don’t even think it’s worthwhile to complain? They don’t see those things. And since they’re inside the polling place (where no photography was allowed, so I didn’t stay long), not on the street, none of them saw the police breaking up a wholesale sale of votes right outside. Well, to be fair to the observers, I later learned that they apparently are aware of this angle. I hung out for a while with an observer from Mexico, and he later told me that the office of one governor candidate was actually closed because the authorities found piles of cash there. It turns out this was the same campaign that was trying to buy the votes when the police intervened. Oh—and he won, and by a large margin. That fact that he’s in Uribe’s group makes it important that we don’t know whether people voted for him because they like him or because it was financially worth their while. I know that one friend received a $30,000 peso down payment, but because she couldn’t find her voting place, never got the rest of the money—but she kept the down payment.

In the period leading up to the election, I either talked with people about what was going to happen (usually here you can ask in any municipio, “Who’s going to be elected?” and there’s general agreement about the outcome) or listened to similar conversations. In the end, I saw four major groups of people:

1. People who vote because they favor one or another candidate, or—like me and many of my friends at home—to prevent a really terrible candidate from being elected. In Medellín, for example, I met a number of people who feel the current mayor is really good, and they want to keep his group in power. But in general, these voters do not seem to be the majority.2. People who vote because they have made a commitment to one of the campaigns—in exchange for consideration received (they sell their votes). Yesterday, a few poor working people I know here were looking for someone to buy their votes…This, of course, is also a reflection of a deep sense that all the politicians are crooked and basically worthless liars. And that doesn’t seem to be far wrong in the majority of cases.3. People who don’t vote out of principle, because to vote would be to participate in a system they think is fatally flawed. Some of these people cast blank ballots, but the majority just don’t go to the polls.4. People who don’t vote because they don’t see the point. “They’re all the same.” “It’s all the same to me who wins.” “None of them do what they promised.”

Of course, this level of cynicism, justified though it may be, is a powerful weapon in the hands of a political elite that maintains the reins of power.

(Since I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of people voting, and I don’t know how to take pictures of people deciding it’s not worth it to vote, here are a few pictures of people trying to figure out where they vote…)